CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Coming out to meet the media has turned into a cruel “Groundhog Day” for Nuggets coach Brian Shaw.

How best to describe a game that looked like so many of the others, that played out like so many of the others, that had the earmarks of so many of the others?

It ended in a loss, like so many of the others.

Monday night, he gathered himself and simply started describing the Nuggets latest defeat, 105-98 to the Charlotte Bobcats at Time Warner Cable Arena.

“They dictated the tempo, and their style outwilled our style,” Shaw said. “Obviously, we want to get the ball up and down the court, and we weren’t very productive in our half-court offense, which we were running most of the night tonight. Just didn’t really seem to get engaged in the game until we were down at the end, trying to scramble and come back. The game was in the balance all night long. We just could never get over the hump.”

The heavy legs that come standard in the second of back-to-back games showed up and could never be shaken off. The Bobcats didn’t play great, but that wasn’t required to beat a Nuggets team that struggled to stay out of its own way all night.

All the Bobcats needed was a sizable dose of Al Jefferson and the discipline to stay solid enough to let the Nuggets defeat themselves with mistakes. That worked to an extent, but the Nuggets’ biggest enemy was an inability to find consistent scoring.

Wilson Chandler scored nine points in the first quarter. He finished with nine points. Kenneth Faried had 14 points and seven rebounds in the first half. He finished with 15 points and nine rebounds. Ty Lawson had seven points in the first 2:55 of the third quarter. He had none the rest of period. Then he had 15 in the fourth and finished with a team-leading 24.

Fits. Starts.

This is how the Nuggets’ offense operated most of the night, and with it came a shooting percentage you would expect — 43.4 percent — which just wasn’t good enough to gain any kind of a foothold in the contest.

“It felt like we was always down like 10, 12 points,” Lawson said.

Defensively, the Nuggets were largely unable to contain Jefferson, though few can. He scored at will in the paint, as is his custom, on his way to 26 points and 13 rebounds.

But the Nuggets never buried themselves, and with just over four minutes to go had chopped what was once a 14-point lead down to five at 87-82. The Bobcats recovered and held on through a couple more anxious moments for the victory.

“I thought we were in the game the whole time,” Lawson said. “It was just a couple of stops and missed assignments that we didn’t get that didn’t let us win the game.”

Chris Dempsey arrived at The Denver Post in Dec. 2003 after seven years at the Boulder Daily Camera, where he primarily covered the University of Colorado football and men's basketball teams. A University of Colorado-Boulder alumnus, Dempsey covers the Nuggets and also chips in on college sports.

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